Management 489

Public companies must all file some certain financial reports every year with the SEC. 

• 10-K is the official annual report, with fully-audited financials
• 10-Q is the quarterly report, non-audited financials
• 8-K is other unscheduled reports that inform investors about significant changes

Search for these using the SEC's EDGAR search, linked below. 

The Letter to Shareholders (sometimes also called the Annual Report) is a highly-polished, slick version of their annual report that many companies produce. Find these just via Google -- [company name] letter to shareholders.

If your company is private, the financial research is considerably harder. Private companies do not have to release any financial information. 

Use Reference Solutions, the U.S. Business module, to look up your individual company.

You can also view some business profiles in Business Source Complete.

See the video tutorials for both of these databases at the bottom of the page. 

Search strategy for articles analyzing your company: 

Limit to Scholarly Journals, or possibly Dissertations or Trade Journals, for deeper analysis than you'll find in news.

Too many results?

• Use “phrase searching”
• Add more words to get fewer results

Too few results?

• Truncation to find all possible endings of a root word – e.g., profit* searches profit, profits, profitability… -- to get more results
• Use fewer words to get more results

Reference Solutions (called Reference USA in the video, but it is the same database): 

Business Source Complete company profiles: